Answering for Islam: Journalistic and Islamic Conceptions of Authority Michael B

Article Answering for Islam: Journalistic and Islamic Conceptions of Authority Michael B. Munnik Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3EU, UK; [email protected] Received: 20 May 2019; Accepted: 7 July 2019; Published: 16 July 2019 Abstract: Media representations of Muslims in Britain have often disappointed both faith practitioners and scholars. Imputed failings include distorting beliefs or practices, essentialising the faith, and amplifying voices that are not representative of Islam. This last factor hinges on questions of authority: what journalists and Muslims recognise as authority can differ in important ways. Drawing on studies of journalism practice, prior professional experience, and ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews in Scotland, I discuss the conventional preference among journalists for “official sources” and the problems this can present in terms of hierarchy in Islam. I contrast this with a less-studied imperative, also present in newsrooms, for “real people”. This category matches well with Islam’s decentralised tradition and presents an opportunity to understand how different kinds of sources are presented in media coverage. It is possible for journalists to ensure that these differing claims to authority are represented properly, though this requires knowledge and responsibility. Keywords: Muslims in Britain; authority; journalism; journalist-source relations; representation; civic journalism; qualitative methods 1. Introduction Authority is characterised in part by its audience; therefore, authority is relational. Gudrun Krämer and Sabine Schmidtke examine authority in their edited volume Speaking for Islam , and they open with a pair of questions that indicate a shift in audience relevant for this article: Who speaks for Islam? Who explains to Muslims whether human rights are a legitimate concept ‘in Islam,’ whether there is such a thing as ‘Islamic values’ and what they consist of, and whether violence can ever be justified from a religious point of view? (Krämer and Schmidtke 2006, p. 1) The first question engages the subject—the one invested with authority—but leaves its audience open: the preposition “for” indicates “on behalf of”. It is only in the second question that the preposition defines this audience: the one with authority is explaining things “to Muslims”, narrowing the addressee to members of the religious community. Authority is thus exercised to articulate the limits of proper belief and practice to the community for which such limits are meaningful. I am, however, interested in a broader addressee for the first question. Who is authorised to speak for Islam to the wider public, which does not necessarily consider itself Muslim? What this audience desires is not instruction on religious propriety that it can accept or reject for its own life. Rather, it wants information to help it understand an external phenomenon, often but not always with an edge of accountability. “Speaking for Islam” can thus become “answering for Islam”, and journalists are often the primary audience through which the wider public is addressed. The topics that Krämer and Schmidtke suggest Muslims might want explained, such as rights, values, and the justification of violence, are those journalists want explained as well. Studies on the Religions 2019, 10, 435; doi:10.3390/rel10070435 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2019, 10, 435 2 of 15 representation of Islam and Muslims in Western news media have proliferated since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 (Poole 2002; Richardson 2004; Moore et al. 2008; Baker et al. 2013; Bleich et al. 2015). Kerry Moore and colleagues studied a sample of UK coverage of Islam from 2000 to 2008 and found that two thirds of the stories focused “on Muslims as a threat (in relation to terrorism), a problem (in terms of differences in values) or both (Muslim extremism in general.” (Moore et al. 2008, p. 3). These preoccupations inform the questions for which journalists expect someone from within Islam to be answerable. Muslims, in turn, argue that this coverage misrepresents Muslims and focuses on sensational topics, employing language that distorts, obscures, or willfully harms Muslims. Social research identifies dissatisfaction among British Muslims with media narratives (Samad 1998; Kabir 2010; Ali and Hopkins 2012; Al-Azami 2016). Even among sources who speak with journalists and contribute to news coverage, the primary word characterising that coverage is “negativity” (Munnik 2018). Muslim organisations in the UK are now countering this narrative: Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND) provide resources to equip individual Muslims or community groups to monitor and respond to media coverage (Muslim Engagement and Development n.d.); an informal monitoring campaign on social media has evolved into the Centre for Media Monitoring (Subramanian 2018; Muslim Council of Britain 2018). Part of the problem is owing to different expectations of journalism. Philip Schlesinger (Schlesinger 1980) noted a wry response from journalists to his ethnography of BBC newsrooms in the 1970s, indicating that sociologists hold journalism to a different, even in their view impractical, standard. Barbie Zelizer (Zelizer 2013), herself a journalist before becoming a scholar, has identified poor communication and mistrust between the academy and the institution of journalism. As well, scholars have argued that the UK media has been a significant carrier of Islamophobia, whether incidentally or deliberately (Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia 1997; Saeed 2007; Ogan et al. 2013). It is beyond the scope of this paper to address all of the suggested failings of journalistic coverage of Islam and Muslims. I examine one source that accounts for some of this dissatisfaction: sourcing and the representation of authority—who is made to speak for, or answer for, Islam. John Richardson found that in his survey of British broadsheet representations of Islam, sources whom he classes as “illegitimate (‘terrorist’) organisations are the most frequently quoted Muslim primary source”, amplified to the detriment of Muslims who are not terrorists and who might criticise violent activities (Richardson 2006, p. 112). In Salman Al-Azami’s study of religion in the media, his focus group of Muslim audiences gave “the overwhelming view … that the media … promoted hate preachers like Anjem Chowdhury [sic] (of Al-Muhajiroun) in such a way that they represented the views of all the Muslims in the world.” (Al-Azami 2016, p. 131). Both scholars and “everyday Muslims” question the representativity of the sources journalists choose when reporting on Muslims in Britain. How journalists understand source authority and what expectations they have of sources differs from authority within Islamic structures. In the following two sections, I review the literature—first from journalism studies, paying attention to alternative programmes defined as public or civic journalism and considering whether their incorporation of more diverse sources offers a different model for evaluating authority. I then consider how authority is understood in Islam, including recent challenges to traditionally conceived authority. In the fourth section, I observe how these two conceptions manifest among working journalists, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Glasgow, Scotland. From this, I argue that the bespoke demands of authority in journalism make the presentation of Islamic authority a challenge, but that journalists have the capacity to frame Islam’s authority structures within their reporting by making it clear in their stories the ways in which a given source might be authorised. Though this does not account for deliberate, ideological misrepresentations of Islam, it provides some tools for improvements within the broader discussion of religious literacy and responsible journalism (Petley and Richardson 2011). Religions 2019, 10, 435 3 of 15 2. Source Authority in Journalism Sources are one of several elements that contribute to the selection and construction of news stories, as identified in some of the classic newsroom ethnographies of the 1970s and 80s (Tunstall 1971; Tuchman 1978; Gans 1980; Fishman 1980; Schlesinger 1987). Herbert Gans, writing about US national news media, suggests that of all such contributing elements, “those governing the choice of sources are of prime significance” (Gans 1980, p. 281), and Jeremy Tunstall, looking at specialist correspondents in UK print media, says journalists who report news—“gatherers”, rather than editors or, as he calls them, “processors”—are “oriented towards their news sources” above any consideration for audience or rival journalists (Tunstall 1971, p. 30). These observations provide the foundation for research into journalist-source relations, a key element of the study of media production. Beyond their relationship to the news makers, source statements and activities provide the stuff of news itself. Studies have attempted to identify news values to determine what gets covered and what does not (Galtung and Ruge 1965; Harcup and O’Neill 2001, 2017), but such lists are derived from coverage, whereas ethnographic production studies are better equipped to assess the processes of news selection. Richard Ericson and colleagues define news as “a representation of authority. In the contemporary knowledge society news represents who are the authorized knowers and what are their authoritative versions

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